We’ll amplify your MASS MoCA experience when we throw open the doors to the museum for free and fill the galleries with art-making activities, lively discussion, and pop-up performance. Create some art, take a tour, catch some live music in the elevator, and learn about the history of our life on Marshall Street.

Trenton Doyle Hancock grew up in Paris, Texas, to a family of evangelical Baptist ministers and missionaries. Supplementing his religious upbringing with comic books and Greek mythology, at the age of 10 he invented Torpedo Boy — an alter ego/superhero he still uses today. At this young age, Hancock already began to develop a singular mythology, which has evolved over the years. Ultimately birthing his own creation myth — as played out through paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, and installation —…

“It will gradually become apparent that at particular moments when there is within a society a crisis of belief…the sheer material factualness of the human body will be borrowed to lend that cultural construct the aura of ‘realness’ and ‘certainty.’ – Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985) Suffering from Realness explores the politics of representation — and the ways in which artists use the body to grasp at and re-center the “aura…

Cauleen Smith describes her work as a reflection on “the everyday possibilities of the imagination.” Trained as a filmmaker, the multidisciplinary artist creates visual and phenomenological experiences that ruminate on social, cultural, intellectual, artistic, and political liberation. Her stunning works draw on poetry, Afrofuturism, science fiction, and tactics of experimental film to conjure alternative narratives and what the artist has called “a cornucopia of future histories.” She engages topics and influences as disparate as the African Diaspora, the image of…